Paracelsus

Theophrastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus (1493–1541), was born at Einsiedeln in the Swiss canton of Schwyz, the son of a physician who taught him medicine and mineralogy. He took his doctorate at Ferrara around 1516 and travelled across Europe as an army surgeon.

In 1526 he was called to Basel to treat the printer Johann Froben. Appointed town physician in 1527, he lectured in German and publicly burned the medical texts of Avicenna.

Rejecting classical authority in favour of observation and experiment, he pioneered chemical remedies and the study of poisons, later writing the Great Surgery. He died at Salzburg in 1541, leaving a movement, Paracelsianism, that transformed Renaissance medicine.